- [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by- (bright music) - Welcome to "Movers & Makers."

I'm your host, Anne Ishii.

In this episode, we travel to Arden, a unique Delaware arts colony located about 25 miles from Downtown Philadelphia.

Behind me is the Arden's tile, the official entrance to the community.

Visitors are greeted with the words, you are welcome hither, taken from the last act of Shakespeare's "King Lear."

And today, all are welcomed as warmly as they would have been a century ago.

(bright music) (bird chirping) - [Lisa] There are three separate communities, Arden that was founded in 1900, Ardentown, which was founded in 1922, and Ardencroft, which was founded in 1950.

They're considered collectively the Ardens.

♪ Ooh ♪ (birds chirping) - [Mike] It was a single-tax colony, as they called them in those days.

The land is owned in common by all the people.

And your house and everything you've done to improve the land is yours.

You don't get a deed to your land.

You get at lease.

(horn honks) ♪ Aah ♪ (Mike laughing) ♪ Aah ♪ - [Lisa] We've heard it all.

We've heard Arden is made up of hippies, of communists, of nudists.

There might be some precedent for a lot of those things, but we're not as crazy as it seems.

Many people are attracted to Arden because it's non-suburban, because it has a tradition of artists and performers living here and performing here.

- [Russ] You've got the combination of people.

It actually is a village.

People walk by.

You sit on your front porch.

You go for a walk and you end up having conversations with neighbors and not getting too far.

- [Sadie] Being in Arden was different than where I came from.

The community really accepts you.

It was like being all of a sudden out of the ordinary.

- [Phil] I'm not gonna say everybody's great, but 98% of the people here are really good people.

I mean, if you need a favor, you call your neighbors.

It's just a great place to live.

- [Bob] I love the community.

It's perfect for me and my personality.

And I'm the incurable collector.

In the pink is Angie.

And then, of course, we have royalty.

On the right-hand side is Shydi, and back in the left-hand corner, she's so pretty.

That's Alice.

♪ Aah ♪ - [Barbara] Arden, Delaware was founded in 1900 by two Philadelphians, one Frank Stephens, who was a sculptor, and Will Price, who was an architect.

They wanted to start a community based on Henry George's principles of a single tax.

- The whole reason for Arden was to demonstrate that a community could thrive and progress by collecting rent for revenue instead of taxing people, which is a confiscation of private property.

Henry George really did understand the problems of the world of unemployment, of low wages.

- Henry George was actually born in Philadelphia.

He wrote a book called "Progress and Poverty" in 1879, which became a bestseller during his lifetime.

He saw that the problems that we have in our society is that there's a lot of poverty where there's a lot of progress.

And of course, we're talking about the Industrial Revolution.

Yes, it helped with a lot of labor, but it didn't give people better wages or a better life.

Wealth was not distributed equitably, so it usually went to the owners of the land or the owners of the companies.

They came to Delaware to look for a place to establish this community, and they found this farm.

They were helped to finance it by Joseph Fels, who was a wealthy soap manufacturer out of Philadelphia, but he was also a Georgist and believed in the single tax and wanted to help support any communities that were established along those lines.

Both Frank Stephens and Will Price were influenced by the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain as well as Louis-Maurice and John Ruskin, but also the Ebeneezer Howard and the Garden City's designs and some of Kropotkin ideals.

They wanted to have an arts and crafts community, which was including people from all walks of life to come to Arden and work with their hands and do something that would give them pleasure in their life.

Some of the early notable people who lived here were Scott Nearing, who lived just down the street here.

And then also Mother Bloor, who was one of the founding members of the Communist Party USA.

And her son was also Buzz Ware, who the community center is named after.

And here, we had Upton Sinclair, this Pulitzer Prize author of "The Jungle" who lived here at the Jungalow, which was named after his book by the community.

(smooth music) Frank Stephens studied at the Pennsylvania Academy in Philadelphia.

His wife, who was Caddie Eakins, Thomas Eakins' sister, who he met in school, she had passed away.

And then he decided that maybe he should do some other things.

He still did sculpture, but he came here with the purpose of establishing this community.

Whereas Will Price also had other ideas, and in 1901 established Rose Valley and tried to build an arts and crafts community there.

Initially, Arden was a summer community.

People came from Philadelphia to escape the heat and the smell.

They would lease the land as in the single-tax process so they could put a tent on it, or a shack, or put up a little shed so they could keep their home goods here so they wouldn't have to transport them back and forth from Philadelphia.

About 1908 or so, realized that they needed to do something about housing to get people to actually stay here during the winter.

The original homestead was built by Frank Stephens and his family when he moved here.

He built a second homestead later in 1909 or so, which was designed by Will Price.

Joseph Fels, again, put up the money and proposed to Will Price that he designed houses that are not only nice to look at, but are in the English tutor style.

Will Price designed the first five or six houses, all still here today and they are what we call the Will Price and Joseph Fels Houses.

The house my husband and I have renovated with a friend of ours, a neighbor, is called Rest Harrow.

- It's an early Arden cottage.

It was reasonably intact from the standpoint of nothing of historical importance had been removed.

And we had the ability to bring it back to life.

- Other Will Price houses in Arden that are notable are Friendly Gables, which is one of the first Will Price and Joseph Fels houses.

and the Lodge.

(smooth music) There is a house called the Fels Cottage.

And then there's also Green Gate.

(smooth music) And then, of course, the Craft Shop Museum and the building here was also done with Will Price in mind.

When they established Arden in 1900, there was this little building here already, which was one of the farm buildings.

And they'd called it the Red House after William Morris's house in England.

And they established it as the center of town to be the Craft Shop, the Gild Hall.

They had meetings here.

They had school.

Everything happened in this little building.

From there, then they decided that they could house artisans and have studios, so they built an addition in 1914.

They also established a forge in the back where they did ironwork for the village.

(birds chirping) - Once we became a museum, which was in 2004, we started being able to receive objects, and the objects are many and varied.

Behind me on our porch is a significant selection of sculpture pieces, both by Frank Stephens and contemporary artists who live here in the village.

We have a marvelous collection of photographs.

There's almost 5,000 photographs available online through our website.

We have a very sweet little child's tea set that belonged to Pauline Young, who was a resident of Ardencroft.

She was a friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, by training an educator and a librarian, a community activist.

And we're just really pleased to have her as part of our history.

One of the, I think, most interesting and treasured items that we have in our collection, it is a petition that was sent to the Delaware State Board of Education to inform that several negro students would be attending the then designated white Arden School.

Ardencroft was founded in 1950 as the last of the communities that we have here on the Ardens.

And its specific purpose was to make available leasehold space to African American and other nonwhite families.

And there was an active campaign to attract those residents.

The petition was signed and sent to Dover.

This was in September of 1952 before the Brown vs the Board of Education decision from the Supreme Court.

And I think it speaks to the way the community acts together.

(smooth music) (birds chirping) - Arden is a very tolerant community.

If you wanna participate, that's great.

If you don't want to, that's cool too.

Pretty much every job in this community is done by a volunteer.

Arden has always had some kind of a newspaper from the very early days.

And the Arden Page, the publication I'm the editor of, was founded in 1975.

It's strictly a volunteer operation.

But I feel that it's a way to really contribute to the community.

I came here at about six months of age when my parents moved here.

Grew up here, attended the school here.

This building I'm standing next to was formerly the Arden School.

It was basically a four-room schoolhouse with grades one through six, four classrooms.

Probably about 80 children attended.

I think we were aware that it wasn't like most suburban community schools.

People from the surrounding communities might've thought the kids in Arden were a little strange, dangerous, up on guard.

(bright music) We have quite a large amount of green spaces and forests that are part of the community.

There's a Arden Memorial Garden and also one in Ardentown.

Like pretty much everything else in Arden, the Memorial Garden is maintained by volunteers.

It's free to be entered there.

And it's just a lovely tranquil setting.

♪ Aah ♪ People take a lot of pride in their gardens here.

Well, this garden is something that has been a project that took 28 years to put together.

But in a way, it also is magic 'cause when they grow and they bloom, it's such a great feeling.

You feel like you put a seed in the ground, and you develop this life form that just takes on its own.

And it's amazing.

I bought my house in 1993, so I've been here for quite a while now.

And it is the community that keeps me here.

- I was born in Arden.

I've lived here all my whole life.

I started doing pottery when I was in college at West Virginia University.

And I came back to Arden after four years and started my own pottery.

I'm still making and selling my work.

- It's quiet.

That is really important.

When I was younger, I really enjoyed landscape painting that I learned in school and so forth.

And then I went into the military.

And after I got out, I was trying to think of an outlet that I would enjoy because of my PTSD.

And I saw a video of an Australian painter, and she does poured painting.

And now I'm not only pouring, but I'm adding some of my old landscaping techniques into the canvases as well.

- I was the luckiest person in the world to get this house.

I've been here 25 years.

(bell tolls) Everything that I really do is basically from scrap steel.

(welding machine hissing) I work three or four hours out there.

And then when I'm done, I just lay everything down and come back the next day and start right over again.

(smooth music) Watch.

I dream of things sometimes.

- I came to Arden originally in my youth when I was around 19.

(water burbling) ♪ Ooh ♪ You see these people who are kind of old in Manhattan and large populated areas, they get in and they feed the pigeons.

Well, I have over 40 or 50 pigeons, and I've had him since I was in my teens.

(smooth music) ♪ Aah ♪ - We stumbled on it because it was on the way to Canada.

And we thought we were gonna have to keep going, and it just turned out to be the perfect place for us.

The founding principle was to integrate art in everyday life.

And in Arden, we're artists.

That's what we've done.

(bright music) - The Arts and Crafts Movement was part of the fabric of the founding of the Ardens.

And the arts in general have been part of the community and certainly part of the Arden Club really from its founding.

The Arden Club began really in 1909 as a social hub, if you will, of the Ardens.

Over time, it evolved into a growing cultural center for various interests.

The Arden Club is comprised of currently 10 gilds.

Gilds have evolved over time.

Some have persisted throughout the entire history.

Other gilds have come and gone.

But we try to make room for anybody that can develop an interest and gather a group of people together to form a gild.

- Shakespeare has been part of Arden for a very, very long time.

From the beginning of Arden's inception, they knew that arts were gonna be part and crafts were gonna be part of the community.

So when they did the larger planning, they had the green.

And next to the green, they put the outdoor theater.

So they always knew that there was going to be a theater, and that theater would be part of Arden.

(performers laughing) (upbeat music) (performers sing indistinctly) - Arden singers are primarily a Gilbert and Sullivan organization.

They do some other shows occasionally in the fall, but typically our major production in the spring has always been a Gilbert and Sullivan show.

Gilbert and Sullivan did comic opera back before the turn of the 1900s, before the turn of the 20th century.

It's called comic opera, but really, in my opinion, it's like the precursor to musical comedy.

(performers sing indistinctly) (performers giggling) - So performing at the Gild Hall is special because it's more intimate.

So the stage is smaller.

The audience is closer to you.

The pit is like right in front of your face.

Versus other performing halls where it's a little more spread out.

I love performing in Arden.

The community is great.

The atmosphere is great.

I really enjoy the intimacy that we get to experience when we are performing and the intimacy of being so close with the cast to really put something magical together.

(performers sing indistinctly) - The Arden Club works on a very voluntary basis.

We do have one or two paid staff members that manage the building itself, but all the activities are volunteer.

The Arden Fair, for example, we recruit over 120 volunteers to help build the fair, run the fair, and take down the fair.

The Concert Gild has many volunteers.

We have bartending.

We have lots of different things, and they're all volunteers.

It works because enough people care about it.

It works because there's a lot of people that wanna see it happen and have a common goal in mind of enriching the community.

(upbeat music) ♪ He's down to four leaves in a field of clover ♪ ♪ Dropped down on one knee (indistinct) ♪ ♪ His black and white world turned to vivid color ♪ ♪ He found his Bonnie lass to be his perfect lover ♪ ♪ And so he rode the rainbows ♪ - I'm Ron Ozer.

And I'm the gild master of the Arden Concert Gild.

Kind of an old fashioned name, gild master, but it's like the leader or the president.

I participate in every show, marketing, ticketing, booking, promotion, all the different aspects of production.

(bright music) The Gild Hall has always had music as an integral part of the life and culture of this town, I would say.

Over the years, there was a lot of hootenanny kind of folk music.

In the '30s and '40s, Burl Ives came here to play.

Eventually, Lead Belly came here in 1947.

We have a great picture, a couple of pictures of when he performed here.

It was two years before he died.

And Pete Seeger the following year.

This Concert Gild that we have now started in 1997.

And in 2002, I asked if I could join.

And it was a pretty small group at that time.

And they were only doing a few shows a year.

And within a year, I became the head of the group, and we expanded the offering quite a bit, eventually to over 10, now over 20 shows a year, all run by volunteers.

(upbeat music) (man singing indistinctly) (audience applauds) (boy shouts indistinctly) - You meet somebody that really doesn't know anything about the Ardens and try to explain it to them, it's a little hard because it's not one thing.

It's a community.

It's a community largely of like-minded people that enjoy each other's company, enjoy the cultural aspects of the Ardens.

I think it's just a very warm, welcoming, and supportive community.

(smooth music) The Arden Club has been in existence since 1909.

And there's been many, many people that have given a lot of time and concern and love to keep it going.

And I'm very confident that it will still be going 100 years from now.

(birds chirping) (bright music) - Well, my grandparents lived here, and I think that there's a lot of history.

- [Anne] In today's profile, producer Kerry Smiles talks with Jael Aumack, the great-great-granddaughter of Frank Stephens, at the original homestead that she's meticulously and lovingly restored.

- This is the original front part of the garden, and it looks pretty much like it used to look.

There's always been a patio out here.

This is the old homestead, the original homestead of Arden.

It was built by my great-great-grandfather, Frank Stephens, in 1900.

The homestead always has looked like you see it now.

The structure is the same since 1900.

You can see the wooden posts, the same roof.

This part of the house was built around 1950, but the original part of the house is the front section that you see there.

My grandparents lived here.

And my grandmother, she was the granddaughter of Frank Stephens.

And in front is the second house that they built, so the newer house that they lived in.

Originally, the homestead was a tent, and then it became a small little house.

And they would just come here for the weekends in the summertime.

And then they started to live here full time when they were building the town of Arden.

I visited Arden for the first time when I was a teenager.

And I came out here with my sister and a best friend.

And my grandparents let us use their station wagon in 1993, and we drove to the second Woodstock.

My grandmother passed away around 2001, and then my grandfather moved a few years later.

And since then, it has been a rental property.

I always had the idea that the house needed to stay in the family, so I decided to buy the house.

(bright music) Oh, I love it.

I love how everything turned out and kept the essence of what my grandparents put into this and my relatives put into it.

- I'm excited to see the inside.

Jael, the fireplace is just spectacular.

- So this is the original fireplace.

And this is one giant piece of stone that was cut and placed in here in early 1900.

This article is from 1964.

And you can see my great-grandma Inky or Mimi, as she was called.

And you can see her here, standing in front of the fireplace.

The leaded windows in the front, those are original.

And the idea of the casement windows was that you can open the windows, and you're part of the surrounding forest or the garden.

(bird chirping) These are the original hardwood floors.

They are red oak floors.

And so I had them refinished.

Arden had a forge, and they made a lot of light fixtures.

And the lighting here is the original Arden Forge light fixture.

You don't want to have a 1910 bathroom or a 1910 kitchen, so you have to be creative on how to make it look so that it fits with the house, but it's modern.

(smooth music) (birds chirping) My favorite part of the garden is this path that we're sitting on.

Originally, my grandmother built this path.

- Really?

- I think she was in her 70s.

- Wow.

- She moved all the rocks and the boulders to create this path that leads to the house.

I remember talking to her on the phone, and she was telling me she was moving boulders.

I was a little concerned 'cause I'm thinking, oh, she's moving these boulders by herself.

That sounds like a lot of work.

(water burbling) And then my grandfather built the pond.

Oh, I love it.

I love all the little details that we've restored and put into the house.

(birds chirping) (bright music) - Here on the other side of the spout path or the woods, if we do meet again, why, we shall smile.

Taken from Act 5 of "Julius Caesar."

I hope you're smiling and that you've enjoyed this special episode from Arden, Delaware.

I'm your host, Anne Ishii, and I'll see you next time on "Movers & Makers."

(bright music) - [Woman] I wanna get all the sites here.

(car engine revving) (car horn honks) - [Announcer] Major funding for this program was provided by-